Image from my SXSW Sexual Privacy Online panel @ SXSW: Interactive, with Jason Schultz, Zoe Margolis, John D’Addario, Jonathan Moore and myself.
Seeing as how I’m soaking in it, I’m fascinated with the constantly changing relationship sex bloggers have with sex and blogging. And through sex blogging, women’s relationship with sex, and humans’ relationship with public disclosure. All of that is in the story of my friend Zoe Margolis (“Girl With A One Track Mind“). You might remember her as the women I had beers with in London (2006) who was so private about her identity she wouldn’t tell me her real name — while we spent a whole evening together. Later, she wrote a pseudonymous book as female sex blogger, only to be viciously outed by the British press after the book’s publication, she was then stigmatized in the tabloids and lost her job. She has just announced that sex blogging has ruined her sex life in the UK and that she is moving to the US where she can …relax about sex? That’s like the opposite of how most of us feel here, so her Guardian UK article yesterday No Sex Please, They’re British is particularly interesting:
(…) What happened shocked me. Soon after I joined the websites, I was then emailed by handfuls of men who would open their messages with, ‘Aren’t you Girl with a One Track Mind?’ Evidently, the medium in which I had become known had propelled me to be a little too well-known for my liking and I’d politely decline and ignore any further emails. When guys then wrote to me and didn’t mention the blog, I would raise my hopes, only to have them dashed when I met them, and they’d admit to me that, like the other men, they had recognised me from my picture and were also ‘fans’ of the blog. Because of their massively intimate knowledge of me, I felt there was no foundation on which to build an equal, healthy, romantic relationship: I backed away from those men too, nice though they were, and shut off my computer, calling it a day.
If it sounds like I would never date someone who’s familiar with my blog, that’s not the case. But if they’re British? That’s now highly unlikely. Faced with a woman who’s written about sex, Brit blokes are more liable to stare at the ceiling and nervously share their insecurities, rather than just getting stuck in, so to speak. ‘I feel weird being in bed with the Girl with a One Track Mind,’ one English guy said to me, as we lay side by side, not touching. ‘You’re not,’ I sighed. ‘You’re in bed with Zoe.’ My experience over the last two years has shown me that we Brits are a little hung up about sex. We seem to stagger from a saucy, ‘Carry-On-ooh-matron!’ type approach to a stigmatised, disapproving and critical perspective with not much in between. To talk about sex among British folk causes red faces; a woman who talks about shagging can expect to be severely chastised. I’m still stunned at the terminology the press – and others – used to describe me, just because I wrote about my sex life.
Contrast this to New York, where I’ve been spending increasing amounts of time, and the difference is amazing. When I was last there, I happened to pick up a free paper on a street corner, and read something just as explicit as anything I had ever written. For a moment I was surprised, and then relieved: it showed a much more progressive attitude to sex than Britain; I can’t imagine an evening paper here carrying an article advocating mutual masturbation. (… read more, via Fleshbot)
Well, this was an eye opener. My perception is that sex has a much more uptight bent here in the states than in England. I always perceived us to be descendants to a bunch of puritanical prudes who thought England was just too naughty and religiously regulating for their own tastes (pretty ironic considering Europeans think of us as very religious). Even my mother-in-law, whose father was born in England and visited family there a few times, said we Americans were pretty uptight about sex. But I guess the English are much more into privacy and find just merely talking about sex to be racy. Fuck, just don’t talk about it. But I suppose when you have a culture about stiff upper lips and suffering through tragedy with a stoic face, I guess bad sex is pretty tragic and must be suffered with quiet dignity and silent pain. I suppose here we would complain very loudly and graphically to our mani-pedicurist about how awful our hubby’s clumsy attempt at fisting and he didn’t use enough lube or wait long enough before trying to shove past the widest part of the hand in.
That’s very interesting to see her take on the state of sex here in the states. I would offer the counterpoint to that though as it depends highly on where you are in the states.
I’m located firmly in the Bible Belt (Georgia to be precise) and my wife and I opened up a small, women-friendly, sex-positive novelty store called Silver Stars Sensual Boutique in an Atlanta suburb. We are now locked in a battle with the city as they have shut us down because we promote ‘items that could be used for sexual purposes’.
We’ve been great community leaders involved in numerous charities and events. Hell, we were even invited to join the Chamber of Commerce which came out and did a ribbon cutting at our store which was featured in the local paper!
But the powers that be have decided that sex is just something that the community can’t handle, so they’ve come in and forced us to close.
I wish Zoe the best and hope that she finds the liberation that she is looking for here. And New York may be just the right choice to do that. But down in the south, many are anything but sexually liberated.
I think anybody with a conscience, or even common sense, would consider what happened to Zoe to be shitty beyond comprehension, and that she felt that she had to move here is a shame. But as smart as she is, I have no doubt she’ll have an amazing time and much success here.
After reading Zoe’s article, it sounds like the real stumbling block is being on an equal footing with a potential partner, learning about each other at the same rate, when there’s so much about her out there. And that readers of the blog tend to be on her “no” list, (although she implies that Americans familiar with the blog might have better standing than the British men–the whole more relaxed about sex thing) just seems a shame. I don’t mean that in a “Dude, [female celebrity] just got a divorce, high-five, we have a chance!” sort of way, but it got me to thinking.
If Zoe is understandably reluctant to bring up the blog, I wonder how she would feel if she met an enlightened American male who kept it to himself that he recognized her, or her work? Eventually the “I have to tell you something” conversation has to happen, given enough time. Fessing up could kill a great thing too early.
I’ll probably never meet the woman, and only know her through the blog, but it sucks that she’s got to deal with all this. Relationships are complicated enough.
Best of luck to her. Sincerely.